


take these broken wings

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Grey Feathers [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: (effectively minor), Animal Death, Brainwashing, Dick Grayson is a Talon, Dick has a moral compass but it's shaky and he's bad at reading it, Earth-3, Gen, Identity Issues, Mentions of Murder, Mirrorverse, Owlman is a monster, Quetico Provincial Park, Self-Harm, bird metaphors, blackbird singing in the dead of night, the price of freedom, what's in a name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 11:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3247964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the botched White House assassination, an unmasked Talon goes to ground...and is left with time on his hands to do the most dangerous thing a weapon can do, besides fail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take these broken wings

**Author's Note:**

> Please note as we begin that the American Robin is actually a fairly large thrush, weighing some five times as much as its famously small English namesake, with a throat that generally ranges from dirty orange to dull scarlet.
> 
> (Also, I'm adding this to the main _Cirque_ series.)

Talon ran.

It was the correct response. He was outnumbered, by armed enemies, in hostile territory. He'd been forced into open confrontation with an unexpectedly powerful opponent. The mission was completed. Capture was unforgiveable. Flight was correct.

His cape and mask had been left behind in the President's hands. Evidence. Proof-of-existence. More damning than his own blood or any number of eyewitnesses. _Those_ could lead only to him, and he was a ghost. There was the faint chance that the abandoned equipment could lead back to the Court.

The mission was completed. The circumstances were far from ideal, but the targets had been neutralized, and he had betrayed nothing vital.

It was _completed._

(He remembered feeling more satisfaction in that, years ago.)

Successive protocol, go to ground in the Court's DC safehouse—not the nice one, for Courtiers; a secret one, buried in the walls of a tall building in the ambassadorial district. Rinse away the bloodstains, eat an MRE, and lie down on the cot. Sleep was an efficient use of time designated for 'waiting.'

When he closed his eyes he saw (green) and (yellow) and _red_ , (silver-white) and (orange-and-blue) and bright steel painted across the insides of the lids, but he was well-trained and weary, and did not let that keep him awake.

Precisely three hours later, Talon woke. He remembered no dreams, but it had been a very long time since he had. It was possible his mental configuration was inhuman enough to function without access to a dream state; more likely he dreamed but did not recall. So long as no impairment of function resulted, it did not matter.

He tasted blood, but if he had bitten his tongue or cheeks in his sleep the wound had healed without any other trace.

Talon performed his daily exercise routine before he turned on the radio. Understanding human voices was not difficult, even if he could not himself speak very well; similarly, his stretches and strength training were so rote he could do them while drugged beyond the capacity even to comprehend and obey orders, and had done so. He could have combined the two activities without damage to either. Doing so was, however, at his discretion.

Talon did not get bored. That capacity had been beaten out of him in childhood. A weapon was not useful if it could not be left sheathed, if it grew _impatient_. It was a liability. So Talon did not grow impatient.

But he did efficiently disperse his activities over the span of time allotted them.

His mission had attracted so much attention that it was still the focus of news broadcasts even in the absence of any further actual news. The White House spokesman was currently dwelling on the bravery of the Secret Service members who had died in last night's 'attack.'

None of them had had the chance to be brave. He had killed them before they knew he was there. (That much, at least, had gone right.) Brave guards would have been no less dead, and no less failures at their duty. The spokesman must have some stake in the honor of the protective detail. Talon flipped into a handstand on the edge of the cot and began doing more pushups.

Upper body strength was easier to build since reaching adolescence, but expectations had also increased. Training was always a valid use of time. Nothing less than perfection was acceptable, for the Owl who flew with Death in his claws.

Killing Wilson within the available time frame had been within his capabilities. Subduing him without killing him had not. Mission parameters required the President to survive to appreciate the Owl's message.

An assassin who had been unmasked and withdrawn under fire was not terrifying.

His master would probably not claim the kill after all, now. It was imperfect.

If the abandoned cape and mask led to his weakness being associated with the Court's name, there would be reprisal.

Weaknesses were not permitted.

But the mission was _completed_.

He held to that until the White House Spokesman finished and another man cut in, much more cheerful, and said a great deal of nothing before handing the conn, _"Over to you, Bonnie._ "

Bonnie was a woman speaking with loud, precise emphasis over jumbled background noise. Probably a crowd of people, not angry, not calm.

" _Although an inside source reveals that little Joey remains in critical condition, the initial surgery was a success—"_

Talon's hearing went…grey, the woman's words fuzzing away to meaningless blurts of sound. He had landed at the end of the cot in a crouch when his focus faltered, but if he had fallen full-length on the floor with a broken wrist he probably would not have noticed.

Joseph Wilson was alive.

He had cut the boy's throat—

( _green eyes yellow hair red blood_ )

—and it had not been enough. He had been interrupted. Distracted. The stroke had gone awry.

The surgery was a success.

Joseph Wilson had survived.

The mission was not completed.

He had failed.

He had _failed._

Talon had not always been perfect, of course. He had a learning curve, just like anyone. New skills had to be acquired and practiced. This was _understood_. Errors and failures during training were only moderately penalized, unless they recurred. Errors had also occurred in the field; those did not matter so long as the objective was achieved without significant loss of resource or face. He was _good_ at improvising around unexpected challenges; tactical flexibility, something Owlman took pride in, especially when there was some mad 'hero' involved and it inevitably became necessary. Ideally he would not _need_ to be flexible, but in a perfectly controlled world he would not be needed at all.

This was not his first tactical retreat, nor the first fight he had not won, not when the world held super-strong Amazons and flying aliens and masters of the martial arts who had been training for lifetimes. Owlman could beat him, of course, always. Being among the world's deadliest assassins was not the same as being its most powerful fighter. He had made mistakes before this, and been overpowered and, despite all of his and his master's efforts, still persistently possessed flaws, though they had grown harder and harder to detect over the years.

Talon had not always been perfect. But he had never _failed_.

Not like this.

His hand was shaking. He stilled it.

He found himself relieved that several days would pass before he could stir from hiding. His master's fury would vent itself on other targets and have cooled somewhat by the time he had Talon once again in his reach.

Or the delay might give him more time to plan the inevitable punishment.

Talon stayed by the radio, adjusting it to find another news station any time the one he was monitoring abandoned the story. 'Critical condition' meant the boy might still die. If he did, the mission would still be complete, despite Talon's errors. Punishment would ensue, but only the standard kind. Not the unknowable wrack of _failure_.

All was not lost.

As he waited for the news that Joseph Wilson had died, he found himself thinking of the boy's father, who had leapt at him and driven him back, blade against blade.

He realized, after a time, that what had so unsettled him in that fight, beyond the fact that it should not have occurred at all or that his opponent had been stronger than he should have been, or the irritation of knowing that he could have won if he had been permitted to kill, was that Slade Wilson had looked at him. _At_ him. Had understood what he was, demanded to know who sent him, and still his rage and vengeance had been focused on Talon. Always before, that focus had come only from people who mistook him for a murderer, for someone who cared whether their loved ones lived or died. Those who, at the very least, believed he could be begged or bargained with. Those who knew him for the claw at the end of the Owl's long reach had looked through him, to the will that moved his blades.

But Wilson had looked at _him._ Torn at his mask as though there was an identity underneath to discover. That one blue eye had been demanding, and the empty pit that he _knew_ was blind had seemed to drill into him deeper still.

The orange soldier held Talon responsible for what he'd done. He'd looked at his face as though he intended to remember it.

There was a mirror in the safehouse, mounted beside the plumbing fixtures to facilitate the application of disguises and confirm that all bloodspatter evidence had been wiped away before venturing outside. Talon found himself staring into it as the radio nattered on about the manhunt for him currently raging outside.

The feeling of being _seen_ still clung to him, heavy and sticky.

His eyes were a darker blue than the one that remained to the swordsman. Without a mask Talon's face was a stranger's, but when he looked at it the way he would at a target—looked into blue eyes the way he had into Joseph's green as he held him down—he saw…

He looked away. There was nothing to see.

"—out of danger," said the radio. "Yes, that's right, I'm happy to announce that Joey Wilson's life is no longer in danger. His condition is stable and doctors anticipate recovery."

So, then.

His hands did not begin shaking again.

He had failed. Thrice over, and utterly.

His punishment would be pain. That was…unimportant. Life was pain. Nothing had ever equaled the hours his body had spent remaking itself after the electrum was first activated.

But he had failed. Thrice over, and utterly.

Owlman had no use for a tool that failed him.

There had been other Talons. Since Gotham first rose beside the sea, the Court had brooded in its shadows, and for almost as long, there had been Talon to enforce its will and secrecy. He was not the first. He would not be the last.

Not the last. And to be discarded…perhaps it was only death. But he did not _know_.

Pain was known, and negligible. The other punishments—darkness, silence, or their opposite, trapped in overwhelming noise and light and caged under the eyes of every Owl there was, until he longed to be buried alive again for the solitude of it. Those had weight. (An emptiness under his breastbone that had nothing to do with hunger, carved open to the world by Wilson's nothing-eye. His ribs spreading like unfurling wings.)

Pain was nothing; fear was everything, and he feared the Owl more than any mouse or bat had ever feared its natural predator. It was the only weakness he was permitted.

Once, years ago, while he was still small but long after he had stopped trying to be anything but what he was, he had hesitated before striking a blow home. Seconds only, and only because the prey was another servant of the Court, and yet had fought against him for her life rather than accepting her fate, and it had—surprised him. The King had bound his Talon at the wrists and told him to run, and bid his Court to hunt.

Very few of them were skilled. But he could not fight them, and he could not run forever. They brought him to bay, in the end. The tearing of dogs and the crack of the guns. The horn.

He could have killed them all. Especially the dogs. Bonds were easily slipped or broken; there had been enough of a lead to improvise a spear, and if he had taken to the trees they would not have known how near he was until they were dying. Might even have kicked some half of them to death, still bound. But his orders had been to flee, not to fight, and bare bones had shown white through his blood before his master called the dogs off. Cut the rope from his wrists and told him, _never fail me again._

He could not run forever. He knew that very well.

Yet….

If he had been certain what the punishment would be, he would almost certainly have returned for it without pause. Whatever agony or death had waited. But the _blankness_ of this, the unguessed-at horror of what punishment might ensue for this unpardonable sin…it was more terrifying, of course, as no doubt intended, but more than that, it forced him to _think_. He could not simply fold that in him which felt fear aside and submit when his mind kept clawing over all he knew of his master's taste and temper, trying to guess. Trying to know.

It could always be made worse. Talon knew that deeper than his bones. And yet the dread unknown of _this_ punishment, which awaited him, eclipsed the world and all its uncertainties. Whatever awaited him, if he tried to escape and was caught it would be worse, and yet.

With his hands unbound, if he turned and killed every hound that snapped at his heels—

If he just—

If—

The hollow under his breastbone screamed and the twin terrors of twin uncertainties screamed and Talon began to feel that in any moment he might scream, too. (How long since he had screamed? He had been much, much younger than Joey Wilson, certainly, with his high, clear voice and his childish trust that if he cried out help would come to him _and it had—_ )

He sliced into his own throat, sharp, one-handed, parting skin and blood vessels and trachea and vocal cords with the same gauntlet that had been used to gut an overeager guard during his retreat. Caught himself against the wall as the abrupt lack of oxygen to his brain robbed him of equilibrium, and then as the tissues flowed back together and the blood stopped spilling from its useful channels, stripped off that glove, then the other, and peeled himself out of Talon's weightless tunic. By the time he stood naked, he could have spoken again, had he had anything to say. But the urge to scream had passed.

He felt very calm.

Tactical analysis: Since there had not been intended to be any surviving witnesses, Talon had been expected to handle his own extraction. Due to the manhunt, his absence from the Court would not be considered suspicious for another three days. He gathered everything that could be considered useful from the safehouse, pulled a hood over his face, and slipped out into the night.

Talon ran.

* * *

There was an art to getting out of a city without being seen. If all he had needed was speed, he could have found a car to steal that would not be reported quickly enough to risk being run down, but between traffic cameras and wherever he abandoned the vehicle, that would leave a trail to follow. He slipped over roofs and through abandoned industrial areas all night, until he was well into Maryland, then around dawn broke into a house that had clearly been closed up while the occupants were on vacation, and slept part of the day on the sofa in an attic study, one ear tuned to the sound of an opening door.

The mail arrived around ten in the morning, waking him, and after determining he was still alone in the house Talon hesitated to sleep again. Subtlety meant hiding during the day, and hiding meant time to fill, and his life had taught him to sleep when he could, but he had slept ten hours in two days and felt well-rested enough to make him restless, even if he had not been strung tight with running for his (freedom) (wings)—life.

The study was a narrow space, all bare wood and sloping roof, which limited the height of the bookshelves lining the walls, with maps and postcards tacked between the rafters. A bird feeder hung outside the single round window, though he had not yet seen any birds. The sofa was faded green velour, with carved wooden feet and a patch on one arm, where the fabric had gone beyond worn-shiny and split open. The only new thing in the room seemed to be the padded black desk chair, which swiveled.

It seemed like a good place to work. Not optimally efficient, but…effective enough. He wondered what it would be like, as he looked at the desk that was cluttered with papers and pens and what must be personal mementos, since they made no sense to him, wondered what it would be like to have a space that belonged only to you. He lingered behind the chair, trying to imagine it was his.

He couldn't. The owner was a cypher to him; he could not even have confidently assigned the person an age or gender, and yet their personality was stamped as clearly into the space as Owlman's was into the Cave beneath Wayne Manor. The same sense of _ownership_ that had caused him to _want_ made it impossible to pretend he _had_. He could not even imagine what a space with him stamped into it would be like. Empty, he supposed.

The ache that had started in his chest…he could no longer say when…it pulled, as though it was a hook and not a hollow.

He thought of a word. A word he had once cared deeply about. A name he had been so proud of.

 _Grayson_.

He was no one's son. He wasn't grey, not really, not in any way that showed. But he flew, even now, and Grayson meant him. That was his.

_Richard Grayson._

He had been Talon since he was small enough to slither between the bars of the alligator enclosure at the Gotham zoo, to kill one and prove his adequacy. Since before that, when the Court had first massed identical around him in their round white masks and taught him the pain that nothing else had ever equaled, the pain that meant all his wounds were nothing ever since, because they would not last and the suffering of them was only in his mind. Since the Owl with hooked beak had gripped him by the throat and whispered, _silence_. He had been Talon almost forever, and Talon belonged to the Court of Owls. So it had always been, as long as Gotham had stood.

Talon looked to the Court. And the Court looked to its King. So it was, even if it had not always been.

Yet Talon would not be running. So he must not _be_ Talon anymore.

 _Richard_ …it meant nothing to him. He had no memory of ever being addressed as _Richard;_ it was a stranger's name, the name of a dozen men he had killed. Not him.

But _Grayson—_ he could remember a warm, booming voice, carrying across the golden circle in the heart of darkness where he first flew, before he'd ever felt the tug of his jesses. _Grayson_ had about the same shape and weight to it as _Talon;_ it would fit cleanly into the space in his thoughts where his name belonged.

Not thinking about the source of the name was old habit, easy to keep even now. They did not _matter_. Even if he had gotten it from them, at first, from those who had made him before the Court remade him, it wasn't theirs to take back at the turn of a coin. This was…his.

The urge to run pulled at him again, more strongly than ever, because _fuck_ if he was going to let that be taken again, and the _want_ drilled through him and left him rocking, laying a palm against the map of Southeast Asia tacked to the wall above the shabby sofa, a green smudge labeled _Bukit Tiga Puluh National Park_ showing between his spread fingers. They looked strange, without their glove, without the claws that should have been carving divots into the surface of the map.

…he knew where it would be difficult to find him.

Six weeks later, a few thousand miles away, the man who was no longer Talon crossed the border into Canada on foot, in the middle of a nature reserve, entirely bypassing the standard checkpoints. There was no one to see.

He had two tarpaulins, a small tent, a single blanket, a large box of matches, and two knives.

If he was careful, he wouldn't have to see another human being until he walked out again.

* * *

Grayson picked his way through the trees, branch to branch. In his first day he had found eight birds' nests, tiny delicate blue and pale-speckled eggs heavy and rich on his tongue, in a way he knew meant they were high in calories. They were tiny, though. If he lived on eggs, there would probably be no birds here next year, and he would miss the sound of them.

That was why he'd decided against hunting them, too, even though they made themselves so irresistibly obvious with their loud voices. That, and they were so _very_ small. Barely a mouthful, under all the feathers. And when he looked at the—( _robins_ )—orange-fronted ones, his chest hurt.

( _My little red Robin. Dickiebird. Love._ )

He _shouldn't_ miss her. It had been…years. Their exact measure had been lost in the dark pit of his early training, but he thought he had lived about twice as long in the Court as in the circus. He had allowed himself in stolen moments to ache for the place itself, for the lights and the smell and the solid, wrinkly skin of an elephant under his hand _,_ but not for her. For them. They had lied, and they had betrayed, and that was the nature of people, but he wouldn't forgive it. Not in them. Not when they had promised to always give everything for him, and given him away for so little.

…Slade Wilson had cared about _his_ sons. Even the orange-breasted bird who had caught him with his hand in its nest had screamed and beaten him with its wings and torn at his face. Very like Wilson, in fact.

No more eggs.

Now, he was tracking a rabbit. Many of his hunting skills had first been practiced on rabbits, before he was trusted with real prey, and he still remembered the look of a rabbit trail. This one dived into a stand of thorny vines, and when he circled carefully, did not seem to come out.

A burrow, then. One end of it. He found a hidden place, safely downwind, and sank into a crouch to wait.

After some eighteen minutes' stillness, a small, twitching nose emerged from the brambles. Wary dark eyes blinked around the seemingly empty sunlit patch of sward. A dust-brown rabbit emerged slowly and settled itself to grazing at the edge of the bed of clover that this burrow was probably positioned to take advantage of. Slowly, the small creature crept forward as it browsed, long ears constantly in motion to catch the sound of a lurking hunter, ready constantly to bolt. Most of its attention trained on the threat of open sky over its head, waiting for the rustle of pinions that was a stooping hawk.

An Owl's wings made no sound, and whatever he was or might become, that skill remained. The moment he judged it was far enough from safety that he could kill it even if detected—he would not repeat his error with the Wilson boy again so soon—he leapt from his hiding place. A single stab into the base of its skull, and it was dead, instantly, before it knew more than a moment's fear. Grayson tugged his knife free, picked up his prey, and paused. A smudge of red across his palm. This was his first kill since he had turned his back on Talon. For the first time since he was a child, the blood on his hands was not human.

It didn't feel any different.

He turned the limp thing over in his hand. It reminded him uneasily of the one time he had been required to kill an infant, and he shut that away hastily. Not being particularly human anymore was not quite enough make him comfortable with cannibalism, and this was a rabbit. Just a rabbit.

Its ears were impossibly soft.

Irrelevant. Back to the campsite to turn the corpse into food. He'd never cleaned a kill before, but he had eviscerated several people, and he'd had flaying training, though it had never been called into use for anything larger than a hand. He expected the skills were transferable.

This expectation turned out to be broadly correct. Precision with a knife and practical knowledge of anatomy served him well enough. The rabbit's skin tore only once in the course of peeling it away, and once it was a headless, furless piece of meat, he no longer felt that odd hesitation.

Cooking proved to be more difficult. No applicable training existed. Eating it raw was a possibility, but one which he discarded. Boiling it would have been safe, but he had not stolen any pans on his way northwest. In the end, he spitted the thing on a straight, green branch, cleaned of bark, and turned it slowly just above the fire until it seemed brown enough.

Hot meat was—startling. The burns on his lips were the result of impatience, and easily ignored until they vanished, but the taste was…good. Not as rich as the eggs had been, but sharper.

He concluded that this method was acceptable, but he would have to learn to do it faster, or spend all his time hunting, butchering, and cooking.

He staked out that burrow until the rabbits learned it was not safe, which happened surprisingly quickly—he had had ambush sites for _humans_ that had lasted longer, and humans could talk, though admittedly the patrons of dive bars probably kept far worse tabs on one another than a herd of rabbits. They probably smelled one another's deaths on the grass. When rabbit traffic dropped off, he found another trail and set up another trap.

On the sixth day of hunting, he found a fox in his blind. They stared at one another for one and a half heartbeats before the fox, recognizing a far larger predator, dived into the brush. Instinctively, Talon's knife left his hand. The fox stumbled, twitched. Lay still.

Grayson stared at the thick rust-orange tail with its white tip, then moved forward and dug the corpse out of the brush. He needed his knife back, if nothing else.

That day he learned why carnivores were not traditionally part of the human diet. He finished it anyway.

It might as well have died for a reason.

Perhaps he should figure out how to fish.

He lay on his back on top of his tarpaulin groundcloth that night, with the fire banked to a soft red glow, staring up at the sky, where the clouds had begun to break up and reveal small swatches of stars. Every so often, the flutter of bats' wings became more than a sound, when one swooped across the stars, devouring its fill of flying insects. (He'd always liked bats. Peaceful, unassuming creatures. Flew alone, roosted together. There used to be a colony in Owlman's inner keep, before the king lost patience with bat shit on the equipment and had them all killed. He didn't give that job to Talon, though. He'd been grateful.) The pinch of mosquito bites along his limbs was oddly comforting, the tiny pain sealing him inside his skin.

This was real, he thought at the stars and bats and biting things. He had failed, and run, and not yet been caught. He should be terrified. He was the rabbit, now, after all his years as a hunter among men. And he _was_ terrified, whenever he thought of what would happen to him if he was caught; he trembled in the place down inside where he had learned to bury his weakness long ago, and terror nearly blotted out all thought. So he had _not_ thought; all these weeks he had merely stayed in motion. He was good at that, after all.

He had focused on his mission of getting over the border, out of the country where the unsettlingly accurate line drawing of his face was still running on every television once a day, the country where the two men who would most like to see him gutted had their power bases. And once he was here, he had thought only of food and drink and safety.

But he was running out of missions to give himself. He did not need much in the way of food or sleep or comfort; he had more than provided for himself already. This was—enough. The forest couldn't be _his_ , not really, but the little space of his camp and his fire belonged to no one else, either, and that was better, for now. This was…

Silent as death, the rendingly-familiar shape of a great horned owl cut across his patch of stars, snatched a bat in its talons, and was gone into the dark.

Grayson's breath stopped for long enough to make even him notice the discomfort.

Stupid, he told himself, filling his lungs. It's just a bird. It has to eat, just like the bats. The fox. Like you. Just like you.

He kept his eyes closed until his breath came normally again, and then let himself watch the stars. The clouds had crawled on and the gaps in them moved and shifted, but the sky was still there.

When winter came, he would move on. This park was not large enough, or remote enough, to live here forever, and he did not truly have the skills to make this a winter home. He did not know whether he _could_ freeze to death, and had no wish to find out empirically. And he needed to get further away. The reach of his enemies was long, and there was nowhere they could not pursue him if he was discovered, but there was no reason to make it _easy_.

He could find another forest, a more temperate or even tropical one, Sumatra even, get better gear and just—live. Like this. He wondered if he could learn to like it, peace until he died.

But he knew…no, he _wanted._ Wanting still sat uneasily on his shoulders, on one who had been Talon so long, but he wanted. He wanted the words that came so easily to other people's lips. He wanted to eat things like candy and hamburgers that he'd seen other people enjoying, wanted to know if popcorn was actually as good as he remembered, because all he could remember of the taste now was salt—more like tears than blood, but like blood greasy. He wanted…he wanted to find the people who had sold him into Owlman's keeping, and hear from their own mouths why. Whether they had regretted it. Whether they were _proud_ of the Grayson he was now. He could still do the quadruple somersault they'd taught him, although without a catcher ready to gentle him out of the spin he often wound up on the ground broken afterward. Which didn't matter; it passed. What would they think of that?

If they gave the wrong answers, maybe he would kill them. Maybe that would quiet the shaking that tried to come into his hands sometimes now, when he thought too much, the thing he thought was called _rage_.

He could stay alive out here, alone. Forever, maybe, if some of the whispers he had heard of Talons were true. But staying alive was all he'd ever been doing. He wanted to _live_.

And he was fairly sure that to do that, he would need people.

His tongue moved across the roof of his mouth. It wasn't his original tongue; that had been cut out during an early phase of his training. This was the third one, and maybe that was why words came to it slowly; it had never learned to speak the way his first one had, chattering away under the high canvas roof of the circus. But if that were the case limb injuries should have done more harm to his combat reflexes than they ever had. Probably every part of him had been carved away and replaced over the years. Maybe that made him not quite human after all, the way victims would sometimes sob, the way Arsenal and Troia and Blaze and the other young nightmares used to whisper when they thought he couldn't hear, _he's like a goddamn machine, Donna,_ _ **Christ**_. Maybe that meant this body wasn't quite so _his_ after all.

But.

The feeling of being seen.

Run through by knowing. The Owl had always looked at him like that, when he bothered to pay attention to him at all, but being stripped to his essential components under his master's gaze had always made him feel _less_ real, not more. He was not sure what was different about what Wilson's mismatched eyes had demanded of him, because it was certainly more than the anger, but.

Being seen.

Darkness was supposed to be terrible, Grayson knew. He was part of the terror in it, and faintly he could remember long ago, when he was inside the small, warm rolling space that had been _mine-ours-home_ , the dark outside the windows feeling threatening. Cruel darkness, masking crimes from sight until the murderers had fled, letting the monsters slip close enough to seize you before you had a chance to scream. (Except he had been too slow, and the boy had screamed after all, and everything had—)

But fear of the dark was one of those things he'd sloughed off when he stopped being a person the way other people were, and not one of the ones he could miss. He understood what there was to fear, but to him…

The truth was, in many ways the night was kinder than the day. It offered more places to hide; it let the sharp jagged truths that daylight would sketch out with all their cutting edges appear gently, inch by inch. For so long he had stepped out into the light only to kill and frighten and fight. So long as he was alone in it, the dark was the safest place to be.

But he could not hide forever. Not if he wanted to take back the things the Owls had stolen from him. He couldn't pass for normal, now, not for very long. It took so much work to remember to move right, to bend his face into expressions, and his one attempt at an extended conversation on his way to the border had resulted in a frightened waitress and a thick, scraped-out weariness he usually associated with too many sucking chest wounds in a short period. The idea of trying to live among people, like he was one of them, of losing himself in the mass of humanity so that his pursuers would never sift him out quickly enough to catch him before he had already moved on—terrifying. Harder than anything he had had to do to himself to survive as Talon. Harder than any of the times he had had to live through what should have been hideous death, as his body pulled its shards back together.

But he had lived his whole life afraid. He would be careful. He would run and run forever, if he had to. But he would not give up. _Mine_ , he thought, his hands closing tightly at his sides, as he fixed his eyes on the fleeting, half-hidden stars. _I won't give it up again._

"My name is Richard Grayson," he told the night.

He had the sense that the night approved.

**Author's Note:**

> Being a hermit is absolutely a valid life choice, but in spite of everything that's been done to him, Grayson is still essentially a people person, in his way.
> 
> Fox is a horrible thing to eat. They're not only carnivores, they're *scavengers.* Blech. As far as the nests go, it's July by this point, but robins lay three or four successive clutches throughout the summer months - grow up fast, die young, that's how songbirds roll. Abuse the power of symbolism? I never.


End file.
